Salon.com > Elizabeth Spiers

A spiritual three-ring circus

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 18:37:00 +0000

Brothers and sisters: This weekend, the good and holy reverend who is called Billy Graham came to Queens, N.Y., and yea, I was there. The reverend descended upon Flushing Meadows Corona Park and I beared witness whilst a few miles away my roommate Mario threweth a Gay Pride party in our West Village apartment. And, lo, the incongruity of the two events didst not surprise me out as much as I thought it wouldth. But everything else did.

-- Book of Me, Chapter 2, Verse 23

When I hopped on the No. 7 train to Shea Stadium to join several thousand people to hear what was ostensibly the 86-year-old Billy Graham's last series of sermons, I was expecting an old-time Christian revival, but that wasn't what I got. I was also expecting the fiery orator I grew up with as a Southern Baptist evangelical in small-town Alabama, but I didn't exactly get that, either.

Bold no more

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 16:27:00 +0000

I seem to remember being introduced to her at parties, and we've exchanged e-mails once or twice, but I probably wouldn't recognize Joyce Wadler if she mugged me in the street and I had to spot her in a police lineup an hour later. It's strange that I don't remember much about her personally because her New York Times gossip column, Boldface Names, is one of my favorites, and if I had pursued her the way I've pursued other writers I've liked, we'd have at least had an awkward, stilted conversation by now. In the past two years, I've edited and contributed to New York's Intelligencer column, freelanced for the New York Post's Page Six and been the founding editor of Gawker, but in all my gossip column-hopping I never found anything quite like Boldface Names under Wadler's tenure, which began in January 2003 and ended on Friday (she will now write for the paper's Home section).

Loyal readers of the column may argue that it was never a gossip report as much as a party report, but let's get one thing out of the way: The classic gossip column -- a column that actually, as the phrase implies, reports gossip -- is as dead as Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper. It was tortured to death by lawyers, publicists and J-school moralists who painfully litigated, negotiated and preached it out of existence. Even Star magazine has fact-checkers nowadays. Things have changed.

Flagrante T-shirt-o

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 02:31:00 +0000

Lists cover the walls of 31-year-old artist and entrepreneur Ken Courtney's Brooklyn apartment. "Reproduce, Consume, Jerk off, Eat, Reproduce, Fuck, Shop, Reproduce, Consume," reads one. Another catalogs trendy celebrities: Chloë Sevigny, the Strokes, Matthew Barney, J.T. Leroy. Luxury brands fill another: Tod, Gucci, Prada, Lexus, Burberry, Range Rover, Marc Jacobs, Rolls-Royce.

Against one wall leans a rack of 50 or so vintage shirts, almost all of which have been screen-printed with statements like "I Fucked Paul Sevigny" (the brother of actress Chloë Sevigny and a member of the Brooklyn band A.R.E. Weapons) or "I Fucked Anna Wintour" (the editor of Vogue) or I Fucked -- fill in the blank with any celebrity, media personality or downtown New York scenester whose name Courtney can fit onto a shirt. Most of the shirts bear their original logos and slogans with the occasional rugby or polo thrown in for variety. Courtney sells them through his company, Just Another Rich Kid for approximately $80 each, and they've become a hot item in New York, where the revival of '80s synthesizer music, Flock of Seagulls haircuts, leg warmers, and heavy black eyeliner have heralded the age of ironic fashion.

Don’t hate David Amsden because he’s brilliant, celebrated and 23

Mon, 12 May 2003 19:00:00 +0000

"I was so fucking fed up," says 23-year-old David Amsden, a former New Yorker intern and current contributing writer to New York magazine. "Enough with this uber-neurotic fiction where nothing really happens! I can't relate to any of the stuff! I just wanted something that felt really raw and honest."

Amsden's first novel, "Important Things That Don't Matter," is the story of a 20-year-old recounting his tumultuous relationship with his cokehead father in Maryland suburbia. "I was reading stories from the '70s and '80s about couples [that are having problems]," Amsden says. "There are children in the stories, but the child is just a wooden literary device." "Important Things That Don't Matter," he explains, reverses the traditional model and tells the story from the child's point of view.

If his age and journalistic résumé aren't enough to generate interest in his debut novel, Amsden's celebrity friends (photographer Ryan McGinley, "Ken Park" starlet Tiffany Limos, among others) and hipster credentials lend glitter to what was already a marketable literary effort. As a result, fascination with Amsden's casually messy haircut, mellow drawl and affinity for clothing that would best be described as "thrift-store chic," can sometimes eclipse interest in the actual book. A recent New York Times article called ("A Night Out With David Amsden: Oh, to Be a Boldface Name") in particular, filled several column inches with such details.

When personal assistants attack!

Thu, 24 Apr 2003 13:21:00 +0000

Lauren Weisberger wedges her lanky frame into a corner seat in the back of an Upper East Side cafe. "Is this OK?" she asks, tucking a strand of her long blond hair behind her ear and poising herself to move if necessary. "Sure," I shrug, "it's fine." She seems a little nervous, and understandably so.

Weisberger's "The Devil Wears Prada" -- a breezily written, thinly veiled roman à clef about the year she spent at Vogue as power editor Anna Wintour's assistant -- chronicles the experiences of Andrea, a recent college grad who works at Runway magazine for an abusive editor. The book was hotly anticipated by media insiders and publishers as both a tell-all about the inner workings of the fashion magazine world and the summer '03 version of last year's bestselling "The Nanny Diaries." The buzz surrounding the book has been amplified by talk of a six-figure advance and a comparable sum for the movie rights, which were sold before the manuscript was even finished.